The Rains are Here, Let’s Capture them Together!

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Photo: a community member from Salitrillo poses next to a newly installed Rainwater Harvesting System, built in partnership with Rotoplas. The Rainy Season Comes and Goes, But the Need to Capture it Remains This year's rainy season has finally arrived, a very important  opportunity to mitigate our growing water crisis. For years, Caminos de Agua’s Rainwater Harvesting Program has been one of our most effective strategies to ensure access to clean drinking water for many of the more than 680,000 people throughout the Upper Río Laja Watershed, where San Miguel and more than 2,800 other communities reside. Last year, thanks to supporters like you, we were able to triple the amount of rainwater systems we built in 2020, and this year we are striving to double that again because the need is only growing. Over the next four months, the rains will fall, and those existing rainwater harvesting cisterns will fill, providing families with sufficient drinking water to last all year long. Rainwater is safe, inexpensive to harvest, and naturally free of extremely hard-to-remove arsenic and fluoride contamination, which plagues community water supplies across our region and are responsible for a host of chronic health conditions.  Drinking stored rainwater, treated with a simple filter that we produce right here in San Miguel, is an effective way of avoiding these threats! During last year's rainy season, rainfall was abundant and it may have seemed like we had received “enough” to quench our needs. But the reality is that much of the rainwater simply went uncollected, and, therefore, largely unused for human consumption. Rainwater, a precious gift of nature, can make a huge impact on the health and well-being of so many, but only if we can capture, store, and ultimately treat it to remove biological pathogens. During our decade of experience, we have continuously improved our ability to partner closely with local communities at risk, helping them create rainwater solutions. At this point, our single biggest limitation is raising the money to continue to help more communities and families.  So all this month, we will be bringing you human stories to illustrate how our Rainwater Harvesting Program impacts the health and well-being of real people. We hope you will join us in taking advantage of this short window of opportunity to build as many systems as we can, to capture the rains that fall, and improve the lives of many. Support this program, and expand water access, by making a donation today. Donate Share Tweet Forward The Story of Salitrillo| Building Community Organization to Assure Safe Water for Future Generations   Photo: Community leaders from Salitrillo share their experiences working on their water issues. The community of Salitrillo is located next to Presa Allende (“Allende Reservoir”), the largest body of surface water in San Miguel de Allende. However, water from the Presa is not fit for human consumption or domestic use.  So, despite being so close to this reservoir, water in Salitrillo is actually pretty scarce. Like all the other communities in the region, rural and urban alike, Salitrillo depends on groundwater from underground aquifers for their normal water needs, and they are decreasing at an extremely rapid rate, making consistent access difficult for tens of thousands in our region. Complicating the issue, and even more worrisome, the water that is available is severely contaminated with arsenic and fluoride, causing irreversible impacts on human health. Dental fluorosis is common in many people in Salitrillo, especially children who are more acutely impacted by these contaminants. Residents are also at risk for other chronic conditions like crippling skeletal fluorosis, chronic kidney disease, cognitive and developmental impairments in children, and even several types of cancer. Photo: María de Jesús, from Salitrillo, posing next to a rainwater system in progress. In 2019, María del Jesús and other community members from Salitrillo decided to take matters into their own hands. This initial group of community mothers, concerned about the health of their children, began organizing, and, together with Caminos de Agua, constructed the first massive rainwater harvesting system for the local elementary school, to help combat the health impacts they were seeing in their children from drinking contaminated well water.  That first system was the catalyst for this core group to expand clean water access throughout their community. After its completion, María and the other women began an extensive process of educating and organizing other concerned families in the community, providing their own workshops with support, materials, and encouragement from Caminos.  As the community organization grew, together, we began building rainwater systems in individual households, to assure that clean water access was not limited only to the school. But they knew that was not enough either.  "We began worrying about our health and that's why we started reaching out to see if there was any alternative to the water we were drinking...that's how we found out about Caminos de Agua. But once we built our own rainwater systems, we couldn't stop there. We had to reach others from our broader community. We needed to keep on working not just for us but for all of our neighbors." María del Jesús, teacher, organizer and mother from Salitrillo   Photo: Presa Allende from the Salitrillo side. The efforts from the community of Salitrillo have continued to grow over the last three years, across several different phases. Individual supporters, as well as new collaborators like Rotoplas and Planet Buyback, have helped finance more rainwater systems there. Today, because of the efforts of María de Jesús and her core group, 37 families now have their own rainwater harvesting systems – representing a lifetime of access to clean drinking water for each of them. Photos: community members from Salitrillo in front of their recently installed rainwater harvesting systems. The Time is Now   Our team and community collaborators are hard at work in 38 different rural communities right now, partnering with them to build hundreds of new rainwater harvesting systems as quickly as possible while the rains are still falling. But to do that, frankly, we need your help!  Rainwater can make such a huge impact on the health and economic well-being of so many people in our region, but only if we can capture it, store it, and treat it so it’s safe for human consumption. While the concept is simple, building rainwater harvesting systems can get pretty complicated. It requires a lot of education, technical training, community organization, and multiple levels of collaboration and trust to bring these systems online and assure they are used and maintained for the long haul.  This is something that we have gotten pretty good at in Caminos de Agua; however, our goals are increasingly ambitious as the need is only growing. Expanding our capabilities to meet these goals, and help the number of families we intend to reach this year, is expensive and not a guarantee. Individual donations continue to be our single largest source of funding, and we feel enormous gratitude for all of your generosity. Please join us this Rainy Season in helping provide more families with life-sustaining drinking water through our Rainwater Harvesting Program by clicking the donate button below and making a donation today. Thank you! Donate